

Last week brought some news which caught my eye. On Thursday, Bloomberg told us this: Germany’s housing boom is over as prices for residential properties dropped for the first time in over a decade. For newer readers the significance of this is that central banking...
Falling house prices in Germany add to the pressure on the ECB

Why the economy is bigger than you think
In what follows I will call upon youthful memories of when we used a mixture of washing-up liquid, water, and a plastic circle to aimlessly and harmlessly blow bubbles into the air. I raise this childish image because a series of bubbles is uncannily like how even a...
Why the economy is bigger than you think

Putting our houses in order
This article was originally published in November 2020. It’s all change in the residential property market as estate agency business models are reshaped and players come and go. Who will emerge as the winners? A paradigm shift in the way business is conducted is...
Putting our houses in order

What to buy in a recession
For most companies, recessions cause a short-term dip in earnings and perhaps even dividends, but recessions are also an opportunity for the strong to take market share from the weak. That’s because recessions cause more damage to weak companies, with many of them...
What to buy in a recession

Stock exchanges
Has Paris really stolen the limelight from the City of London? In late 2022, the French press exulted at the news that Paris’s market capitalisation had overtaken London’s. While these financial centres have been competing for more than two centuries, Paris faded from...
Stock exchanges